Yay, more papercutting! Ok, so I love robots (and if you've followed any of my art, you probably already know that). Like, really, really love them. And when I got into papercutting, one of the first things I wanted to make was a robot papercutting. Thus, this precious baby came into fruition:

Papercutting from a single sheet, mounted on top of a watercolor backing, about 7x9". This is actually inspired by one of my favorite images ever, Robot 1920, by Giacobino:

So I set about trying to translate it into a papercutting, which proved to be an enormous challenge and pissed me off to no end. The problem is, all those little pieces where the robot is flying apart, have to be touching in some manner, for the thing to work. I went through several attempts to make it work, before I finally got it. So the straight diagonal lines in the final image aren't just for aesthetic, but also to help hold all the little pieces together, to give the image a framework in which to explode around. Whee!

So below, you can see how I mean. I printed it in black and white, so I could see the primary lines of importance, and began cutting, making sure to go in very small areas, so I could make sure nothing was getting cut that shouldn't be. As I finished an area, I would cut and peel away the reference picture, to reveal the actual papercutting underneath, so I wouldn't accidentally cut something twice.

And the reverse side:

And the final cutting before I mounted it to the watercolor backing. Of all the papercuttings I've done, this is actually one of the most delicate, because there are so many tiny pieces that are connected to the main sheet by hardly more than a hair's width of paper. I just about murdered the parent of one of my music students, who came in to drop her kid off for a lesson, and just scooped it up out of my sketchbook by one of those thin diagonal lines to look at, and almost ripped the whole thing in half (the mom did this, not the kid). I screeched completely unabashedly, and she was extraordinarily embarrassed, and I literally have no sympathy. Ugh, dummy.